I peered up at the clouds as I pulled off the property and started driving home along the river, my wet shirt clinging to me.
I didn’t know where I would go when I left. South. That’s all I had. South. I’d just drive until I ran out of gas or out-drove the rain. The thought of coming up with a plan felt so exhausting to me, I couldn’t even consider it.
Maybe it would get better the farther away I got from here and her. Maybe it would lift like a fog, and I’d be able to breathe and think enough to function again.
When I got home, I peeled off my wet clothes and climbed into bed. It was only six o’clock and I was more weary than tired, but I didn’t want to be awake anymore.
I fell into one of those sleeps of the brokenhearted. The kind that breathes in and out, between here and gone. You want to dream about them but then regret it when you do, because waking up hurts too much. So you hope for nothing but black. The temporary reprieve from existing without them.
It was dark outside when my phone rang. Rain was tapping on the roof.
I almost didn’t answer the call. I was glad I did. Because it was her.
“Hello?” I said into the darkness.
There was a long pause before I got a quiet “Hi.”
My heart didn’t pound the way I would have thought at getting an unexpected phone call from her, a month since the last time I’d heard her voice. But it didn’t feel like this was actually happening. It felt like a dream. Like I wasn’t fully awake. And then when I started to realize that I was awake, my heart didn’t pound because it was in pieces in my chest and it didn’t work anymore.
We just sat there, quiet. Like just being on the phone not saying a word to each other was its own form of communication.
It was.
A thousand words passed through the silence.
She missed me.
She was thinking about me.
She loved me.
Not a single one of those things stopped being true when she ended us. And that was the most tragic thing of all.
“How have you been?” she asked into the silence.
“Fine,” I lied.
A long pause.
“Did you save up enough for the house?”
I let out a breath. “Yeah. I did.”
“You did?” She sounded genuinely happy for me. “That’s amazing.”
“Yeah, the Etsy store and Instagram page helped a lot. So thank you.”
I could picture her nodding.
“You want to know how I did it?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I raised my prices. A lot. Like, twelve thousand dollars for that lightning strike table.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. I realized when you hit zero fucks, that’s when negotiations begin.”
“What does that mean?” A small smile in her voice.
“It’s just that I didn’t care if they sold or not. When you don’t care, everything’s on your terms. They can take it or leave it. It doesn’t matter to you, so ask for whatever the hell you want.”
“Ahhh. Well, I always thought you were undercharging. I’d pay that for one of your tables.”
“Yeah, well, you’re a Kardashian, so…”
She gasped. “I am not a Kardashian.”
I smiled a little. “Have you seen your house?”
She made a playful indignant noise.
“You even have a surgeon living in the basement.”
She let out a laugh. The sound made me feel happier than I’d felt in weeks.
It amazed me how easily we just started again. But then it didn’t. Because if I didn’t see her for twenty years, it would still be like this. It was like this from the moment I’d met her, and it would always be like this between us. This was part of it. This is what made it easy.
This is what made it hard.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“In my room. In my bed.”
The ache that I felt at this was almost more than I could stand.
I could picture that room now. Where she was lying, the blanket she was tucked under. I could be there. Or she could be here. Or we could be anywhere, as long as we were together, and everything would be okay again.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“In my bed.”
Now she went quiet, and I wondered if she was thinking the same thing I had.
“Is your room dark?” she asked.
“Yeah. But I forgot to turn the light off in the bathroom, so there’s a little light coming from under the door. Is yours dark?”
“Totally dark.”
There was something intimate about calling someone in the pitch black of your bedroom in the middle of the night. It’s like a whisper. It’s private. It means something.